Monday, May 22, 2017

Brooklyn Nine-Nine 4x19 and 4x20 Recap: “Your Honor” & “The Slaughterhouse” (Burglaries and Drug Busts) [Contributor: Alisa Williams]


“Your Honor” & “The Slaughterhouse”
Original Airdate: May 16, 2017

This week brought another pair of back-to-back episodes for the Nine-Nine squad, and the team was up to its usual shenanigans. Let’s recap!

In the first episode of the night, we get to meet Captain Holt’s mother. The Honorable Laverne Holt serves on the second circuit court of appeals and is one of the first black women to become a federal judge. Amy, obviously, is a huge fan. She even wrote Judge Holt’s Wikipedia page. The Judge’s house has been burgled and Captain Holt assigns Jake to the case. Amy’s devastated she wasn’t assigned but is quickly distracted when she finds out Gina blew a tire and doesn’t know how to change it herself. Amy volunteers to teach her — despite Gina’s protests.

Meanwhile, Terry tells the team that the precinct has received a bit of money to spruce up their breakroom. He’s open to “any and all” suggestions, but quickly realizes this was a mistake when Boyle suggests hiring the Property Brothers and Hitchcock and Scully suggest an arcade-style game with naked lady pictures. Even Rosa gets in on the suggestions, revealing a secret love of interior design.

At Judge Holt’s house, Jake pokes around the crime scene, which is a pretty straightforward break-in. Apparently, the Judge was at wine club when it happened and then she remembers that another wine club member’s house was also burgled a few weeks back. Jake realizes the burglar must have some connection to the club and asks the Judge to get him and Holt into the club undercover. Fortunately, there’s a meeting tonight.

Captain Holt pulls Jake aside to tell him to stop with his usual antics, which Holt feels are annoying his mother. Jake disagrees and feels he and the Judge are really bonding. Holt attempts to disagree again but Judge Holt interrupts them and tells Jake he’s welcome to call her Laverne. Jake takes this as a great sign but Captain Holt remains unconvinced.

Back at the precinct, Rosa, Boyle, and Terry have just put the finishing touches on an immaculate new breakroom. They’re very proud of their new-found interior design abilities and even discuss starting their own home renovation show. But Hitchcock and Scully are unimpressed. They absolutely hate what’s been done with the place.

Amy successfully changes Gina’s tire for her but doesn’t realize Gina was watching a video of a monkey the entire time and didn’t learn a thing (except that monkeys are pretty awesome). Gina’s quite proud of herself for duping Amy into changing her tire for free. All in a day’s work.

At wine club, Jake and Captain Holt are undercover and making the rounds with their faux identities. They chat with a suspicious older gentleman who keeps making eyes at Laverne and who gets a bit flustered when they ask him how he heard about wine club. They run the gentleman, George Henderson, through the system and find out he got a parking ticket outside Laverne’s house last week. Captain Holt reveals this to Laverne, who appears shocked. After Holt walks away, Laverne confides to Jake that she’s been secretly seeing George for two years and hasn’t been able to find a way to tell her son.

The next morning, Holt and Jake are following George in their car. Holt plans to arrest George, whose prints have been found all over Laverne’s house. Jake is forced to come clean about what he knows. Holt is visibly upset, stops their car in the middle of the road, gets out and stalks off. He takes the keys with him, leaving Jake stranded. They meet up back in the precinct a few hours later, having both presumably walked back.

Holt is still upset and when his mother pays a visit to the precinct, he declares her under arrest for obstruction of justice. Jake talks him down from that plan but Holt tells Jake he will have to handle the case on his own now because Holt has no interest in helping his mother. Jake ends up quickly solving the case. Last night there was a break-in at the address Jake gave the wine club coordinator. She was the only one who knew the address and Jake is able to arrest both her and her accomplice.

Rosa, Terry, and Boyle are shocked to find that no one is using their fancy new breakroom and are instead packed into the kitchen. Turns out Hitchcock and Scully were right all along. Though the breakroom is beautiful now, it’s not functional at all. They put the breakroom back to the way it was, much to Hitchcock and Scully’s relief.

Out in the parking garage, Amy confronts Gina as she’s leaving for the day. Determined to force Gina to learn how to change a tire, she triumphantly stabs Gina’s freshly changed tire. Only one problem: it’s not Gina’s car. Same make and model, but Gina’s car is actually a few spots down. All Amy’s managed to do is deflate a random stranger’s tire.

Amy finds the stranger and brings her out to the garage to confess her crime. But the tire is fixed. Turns out Gina fixed it by watching a video online that taught her everything she needed to know. She practiced on a few other tires first, though. Specifically, all four of Amy’s, which she didn’t bother to put back on.

Back inside, Jake confronts Holt about his anger toward his mother and tells him he needs to sit down and talk it out with her. Holt refuses but Jake tricks him into it and Judge Holt and Captain Holt are able to talk about their feelings. Captain Holt even gives his begrudging approval of Judge Holt’s relationship with George. Jake is beside himself with excitement for helping the two Holts over this rough patch in their mother-son relationship.

In the second episode of the night, Jake and Rosa meet Lieutenant Melanie Hawkins when they accidentally arrest two of her undercover agents in a drug bust and inadvertently let the real bad guy, Billy Ocampo, get away. To make matters even worse, Lieutenant Hawkins is their idol — she is everything they both long to be one day, and now they’ve enraged her. Had they not messed up her undercover operation, she would have been able to use Ocampo to take down an even bigger fish — one of the biggest drug dealers in the city.

Jake and Rosa vow to help her track down Ocampo so she can salvage her bust and hopefully still get info on the bigger dealer. But she tells them to stay as far away from Ocampo and her case as possible or she’ll suspend them. Of course, they don’t listen. They’re convinced they can bring him in, save the day, and get back into her good graces.

Meanwhile, Hitchcock and Scully are in a fight. Hitchcock is upset because Scully lied and said he couldn’t hang out because he was sick, but he was really spending the evening with his new girlfriend, Cindy Schatz. Terry and Boyle have no idea what to do to get these two besties to make up.

Captain Holt is having issues of his own. His favorite pen is being re-nibbed in Germany so he borrowed Amy’s favorite pen... and lost it. He was on the roof, practicing incorporating more hand gestures into a speech, when the pen flew out of his hand and was lost on the wind. Holt’s afraid to tell Amy. After all, Amy has been known to refer to her pen as her best friend, and he doesn’t know how to break it to her. Gina says it’ll be fine — Amy is incapable of being mad at Holt. He’s dubious, but Gina proves it. When she tells Amy about the pen being lost, Amy is livid until Gina says it was Holt who lost it. She immediately tells him it’s totally fine and it’s “just a pen.”

Rosa and Jake have been working the case, tracking down leads on Ocampo, when Rosa gets a call. It’s from Hawkins, who tells her she knows they’ve been working the case and to get down to her headquarters now. Hawkins’ headquarters is in an abandoned warehouse full of nifty tech equipment and lots and lots of guns. She’s dubbed it The Slaughterhouse, which only impresses Jake even more.

Surprisingly, she’s not angry at them for tracking Ocampo. She’s reviewed their files and recognizes they do great work. She asks them to keep looking into leads and if they manage to find him, there’s a spot open on her team for one of them. Even though Jake and Rosa know it makes the most sense to keep working together to find him and not turn this into a competition, they can’t help themselves. They both want to be on Hawkins’ squad so badly.

Hawkins is already impressed with their work, so now it’s come down to who she likes better. She bonds with Rosa over a shared love of motorcycles, but she also bonds with Jake over a love of Diehard. In a panic, Jake pretends to love motorcycles too, and next thing he knows he’s handed the keys to one as they all ride off to take down Ocampo. But Jake’s never actually ridden a motorcycle before and the bike takes off without him.

Back at the precinct, things have gone from bad to worse with Hitchcock and Scully. They’ve started squirting ranch dressing at each other from across the desk. Terry decides that if they’re going to act like kids, he’s going to treat them like kids. He takes away “the thing they love the most,” which is sitting. With their chairs gone, they start shoving their desks back and forth and end up slipping on all the spilled ranch dressing.

To force them to get over their issues, Boyle decides to sit them down with a children’s jigsaw puzzle they have to solve together. Terry thinks this is a great idea, but it only leads to strewn puzzle pieces and Hitchcock and Scully choking each other.

Gina tells Terry and Boyle they’ve been dealing with the Hitchcock-Scully dilemma all wrong. Instead of treating them like children or like adults, they should have been treating them like the wild animals they are. She goes up to them and shouts at them to stop fighting, clapping her hands together. Once they’ve gone silent she offers them a cookie each if they give each other a real apology. They do, and that’s that.

Meanwhile, Holt calls Amy into his office. He wants her to get angry at him about the pen but she can’t do it. She tries to fake being angry but he sees through it. Holt goes out to the roof to think over what a failure he must be as a captain that one of his employees can’t express anger toward him. Amy finds him moping and gets angry that he’s blaming himself instead of realizing this is her issue. Before she knows it, she’s yelling at him and just lets it all out.

Rosa and Jake are now in full competition mode. Rosa laces Jake’s water with caffeine pills to make him too jittery to work. Soon, their snitch calls in with a tip on where Ocampo is. They both race out to the parking lot, where Rosa discovers Jake emptied her gas tank (and accidentally swallowed some gas in the process) and Jake discovers Rosa stole his steering wheel. Rosa takes off running. Jake tries to follow but with so much caffeine and gasoline in is system, he has to stop.

Jake manages to reach the warehouse where Ocampo is at the exact same moment Rosa does, though. Surprised, Rosa asks how he managed to drive his car without a steering wheel. He tells her he had a Frisbee in the trunk that he duct taped in place. He hit a bunch of stuff on the way over but he made it. Inside the warehouse, Rosa suggests they split up to look for Ocampo and decide whoever finds him first is the winner. Jake manages to find him first.

Later, when he comes over to ask Rosa if she’s okay with him getting Ocampo and therefore the taskforce spot, Rosa says she’s fine, she’s just disappointed that she’s missed her opportunity to work for Hawkins. Her superior officers have always been guys and she thought it would be cool to finally work for and learn from a kick-butt lady.

When they get to the warehouse to turn Ocampo over, Hawkins is shocked they were able to catch him and asks who found him. Jake gives Rosa the credit. She tells Hawkins that’s not true and then Jake and Rosa start arguing. Hawkins interrupts them and says she likes they have each other’s backs, and the most important thing on any team is loyalty. So, she’s going to give them both a spot on her taskforce.

They’re beyond excited but try to play it cool in front of Hawkins. Once they get outside, Jake and Rosa let loose and even hug. Before they head out, Jake runs back inside to use the bathroom. He hears low voices in the backroom and peeks in. Hawkins is talking with Ocampo, asking how much he can get her for a bag full of diamonds and telling him to make sure he doesn’t get caught next time. She’s dirty!

We’ll have to wait until next week to see what happens in the last two episodes of the season.

Bullets on the Bulletin Board:
  • “The odds of that happening coincidentally are vanishingly small.” “I would say infinitesimally.” “Yes, and I would say teenily-weenily. We all know words.” 
  • “Final question! Is this little Raymond’s macaroni art?” “No, that’s a macaroni infographic he made about educational spending during the Johnson administration.” “Ahhh, of course it is.” 
  • “We have shui-ed the feng out of this place!” “It’s beautiful. Are we better at this than our regular jobs?” “Unquestionably.”  
  • “Stop yelling at me! I saved the day!” 
  • “Stupid criminals have NO respect for the people trying to bust them.” 
  • “My name is Detective Ignatius Pennyfeather the Ninth! That’s I... G... natius...”
  • “She is so cool. She’s been buried alive three time. I’ve only been buried alive once.”

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